Reds at Brewers (June 15, 2014)

The Reds hope to give you the gift you always wanted today: A Reds victory and series win over the Milwaukee Brewers. Mike Leake takes the hill for Cincinnati, trying to get back on track after back-to-back 5-run outings. Similarly, Marco Estrada is trying to recover from a string of five straight poor starts.

There were multiple cringe worthy statements made there…note that I wasn’t quoting him.

:::Votto takes walk:::

He says (I believe this is verbatim but am too lazy to rewind so we’ll call it paraphrased) Votto couldn’t be happer with that result. Goes on discussion how Votto refuses to swing at pitches outside the strike zone, even when runners are in scoring position, all with negative connotation.

Then he implied that Votto stubbornly refuses to change his approach (as if he should even consider it).

Then he talked about how run producers around the league share Votto’s hitting philosophy, as if there are a bunch of Joey Votto’s around the league.

I knew RLN would blow up when Votto walked. I’m surprised the servers didn’t crash. It was almost as sweet as his walkoff HR earlier this year…in the minds of some. The Brewer pitchtracker showed the ball catching a piece of the plate. FWIW….I enjoyed all 4 of those run producing at bats

That pitch to Votto did look pretty close. It just seems like sometimes the walk is the best-case scenario for him. Today’s was a ball, or was called a ball, whatever. But some of the strike-three-called against him fuel the question of how hard he tries to walk, when it seems that typically we’d cry for the batter to protect the plate on close pitches. I didn’t see yesterday’s game, but I heard it happened a few times then.